Locating the Typhoon Center from the IR Satellite Cloud Images

The typhoon center location is important for weather forecast and typhoon analysis. However, the appearance of the typhoon center as viewed from the IR satellite cloud image will have different shape and size at different time. At the genesis stage, the center of a typhoon is quite ambiguous. When it reached to certain strength, there will be an eye appeared at the center. As the strength of the typhoon getting stronger, the eye tends to shrink in size and also becomes clearer. When the typhoon hit the land, its strength will decrease and the eye may disappear. Only well-trained meteorologists can identify the typhoon center from the satellite cloud image when there is no eye. Since the portion surrounding the eye will do the most damage, it is important to locate and track the center of a typhoon. In this paper, we proposed a novel approach that partitions the satellite cloud image into slices and use morphology operations and image classification methods to automatically locate the center of the typhoon with or without eye. We applied our approach to locate and track the center of different typhoons occurred in recent years and achieved high accuracy.